Organizations of various kinds are known in the art. Examples include business organizations of various kinds (including privately held and publicly traded corporations, partnerships of various kinds, and so forth), charitable and philanthropic organizations (including both profit-based and not-for-profit entities), ecclesiastical organizations, fraternal and other membership-based organizations, and so forth. Such entities are typically recognized at law as having an independent legal standing. Accordingly, such organizations continue to exist even as the persons who comprise the agents of such entities come and go over time (as a result, for example, of death, illness, retirement, and so forth).
Most organizations have at least some information that comprises confidential information. The nature and extent of such information can and will vary widely with respect to the nature of the organization itself as well as the relative sophistication or naivete of the organization with respect to identifying and maintaining information of this kind.
Existing behaviors in these regards, however, leaves much to be desired. In many cases, a given individual within such an organization will find that their greatest asset comprises information. Information regarding what to do, and what not to do, in various situations, for example. Information that reflects, in some cases, a career's worth of experience, experiment, and observation. For the most part, existing practices handle such information rather clumsily if at all. In many cases, at best, an existing agent of a given organization serves as a tutor for their replacement and passes along whatever they think might be useful. The flaws of this approach are many and considerable.
Further, the personal handing down of wisdom, experience, and advice from one generation of agents to the next is only as reliable as the weakest successor link. A poor or uninspiring deliverer of such information and/or an uncaring, uninterested recipient can contribute to a complete loss or distortion of such information. There are also individuals (and even entire organizations) who harbor a concern that their personal story will be subject to intentional or unintentional revisionist alterations at a time when they will be unable to correct misunderstandings. Again, the accuracy of a given narrative is more likely to change with retellings from one generation to another than not.
By one approach, a given agent or organization can commit such information to a book, an Internet resource, or other public mechanism to ensure that such information is not lost in such ways. This, however, requires releasing such information to a public forum. At worst, persons outside one's organization may use such information while those within the organization ignore it, all to the possible eventual harm of the organization in a competitive world.
A genuine problem exists, therefore, with respect to providing an organization's wisdom, experience, and advice to future generations in a manner that tends to preserve both the sanctity of that information and its confidentiality or limited dissemination. Present solutions offer a look-and-feel of value in this regard, but are in fact greatly lacking in substantive effect.